September 2000

- And such is the life in IT today. As the half-life of knowledge pushes 18 months, getting buy-in for new projects and expenditures becomes not just a full-time effort but one that will tax the abilities of any CIO. As change becomes almost continuous, baseline education and promoting champions are essential. But where do you find such heroes, and how do you develop a network of support that will always be available?

- I've finally found a topic that I know better than anyone else. There is one area in which I have more experience and -- if I may be so bold as to say -- an innate talent equaled by few and exceeded by none: making mistakes. Pick a subject, any subject. I've either screwed it up or if it's something new, I will proceed to screw it up at the first opportunity. And that's one of my biggest assets.

- An idelout program (inactivity monitoring) Out of the box, Logmon is configured to never log off "root", and to send a warning to everyone else after 60 minutes of inactivity. If you want to change that default action, you need to first understand the flow of the profiles.

- It's almost a shame that the title of this has "Caldera" in it, because I think this is the best general Linux book I've read yet. In fact, there's really very little in here that is Caldera specific; most of the book is fully applicable to most any Linux version.

- At several points while reading this I found myself wishing that the author would give more examples- I had forgotten what follows "XML" in the title, so I really didn't appreciate the irony of that until I started writing this review.

- Detailed instructions for configuring SNMP on SCO systems. The SCO supplied configuration hostmib OID is wrong. (Actually, the OID is correct, but the MIB is compiled with the wrong OID. Therefore, the hostmib line must be tweaked to compensate.)